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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: TimS 02 June 2013 02:22AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 06 June 2013 08:05:38PM 0 points [-]

Aaronson is just trying to make the point that it's possible to make a formal distinction between nondeterminism and randomness. Mathematically, a nondeterministic function is a function that returns a set of values rather than a value, and a random function is a function that returns a probability distribution over values rather than a value. The fact that we can make such a formal distinction suggests that we ought to also be able to make an informal distinction.